After input from many of you guys and the NYC group, I am announcing planetrationalist.com
There's a lot of different directions this sort of idea could go in, but I figured that this could be a good-enough first effort.
Enjoy, and let me know what you think.
The connection has timed out.
The server at planetrationalist.com is taking too long to respond.
Options for now:
Out of curiosity, what don't you want to see and why?
I like the aggregation, but there are a lot of posts for each day. I just thought it would be nice to reduce the amount to something manageable to cover in a few minutes a day, and to be able to choose which sources. Of course this is available with RSS and whatnot, it's probably not something you need to focus on soon.
I like it! Thanks for providing this.
Only minor quibble is the fact that some of the blogs only put a short snippet in their RSS-feed. As I like reading things in a feed-reader (actually, feed2imap + my e-mail client), having to open a browser to read things is small nuisance.
So, as a small feature request, maybe offer a way to filter the feeds to only get the ones that have the full text in their feed?
I've thought of ways of working around this. There are ways of actually defeating the truncation. One issue is that there isn't necessarily an obvious programmatic way of telling which feeds are truncated and which aren't.
For now, try out this feed proxy: http://andrewtrusty.appspot.com/readability/ , e.g. http://andrewtrusty.appspot.com/readability/feed?url=http%3A//feeds.feedburner.com/planetrationalist
I've checked out planetrationalist.com several times in the past few days, finding interesting stuff to read. So, you get my upvote.
Sweet. I endorse you doing things. You need share buttons - I want to be able to send these articles out or tweet them with a click.
Hmm, I was wondering how much people used those things. Do you want just twitter + email? Facebook?
All of the above, I'd just install some basic set of sharing buttons. Email, twitter, facebook, maybe Google+.
I've re-instated twitter so far. The issues are: general visual clutter, I found a way to mitigate this issue by using a trick to force lower the visual contrast of the buttons, and that these social buttons often really slow down the loading of the page, especially if you want the dynamic share/like/retweet counters for every item. I might leave the counter on twitter but omit it for the others and see what the page load is like.
I'm not sure what email-sharing service to use... facebook has one in its "share" button, there are probably others.
Very interesting, I suspect I will spend a lot of time reading this.
How are you defining rationalist for these purposes? How are you selecting the blogs?
To be completely honest, I wasn't going on a strict definition of the term rationalist; frankly I consider the term kind of flawed anyway. But I don't have a better replacement in mind. For me it means being interested in being rational, being interested in how the mind works, being interested in cognitive biases, Bayes' rule, probability, statistics, logical fallacies, and scientific self-improvement.
I've re-instated twitter so far. The issues are: general visual clutter, I found a way to mitigate this issue by using a trick to force lower the visual contrast of the buttons, and that these social buttons often really slow down the loading of the page, especially if you want the dynamic share/like/retweet counters for every item. I might leave the counter on twitter but omit it for the others and see what the page load is like.
I'm not sure what email-sharing service to use... facebook has one in its "share" button, there are probably others.